What you need to know on Wall Street today
Welcome to a special edition of Finance Insider, Business Insider's summary of the top stories of the past 24 hours. Ahead of July 4, here's an introduction to "Undividing America," a special editorial series.
It was 13 years ago that a young senator from Illinois stood in front of the country and declared that "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America."
Since that 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention catapulted Barack Obama to the presidency, these states have felt less united than ever - whether you define that as red versus blue, cities versus country, or coasts versus the center. This is the era of the 99%, "death panels," Black Lives Matter, and Donald Trump.
It's why you may feel as if the US isn't one nation but rather a collection of bubbles, each with its own politics, economic issues, culture, demographics, and beliefs.
Business Insider reporters have spent the past four months traveling the country, including stops in Alabama, Iowa, Texas, and Vermont, looking at many of the ways this nation is divided but also searching for common ground. The result is more than 24 stories coming this summer, featuring the voices of more than 100 Americans. What we've found is a nation still grappling with issues that have bedeviled us for decades, like school segregation, but also a country that is more complex than the traditional narrative of division would suggest.
We're calling the series "Undividing America." We're not "undivided" yet, nor is this country anything like the "united" states that Obama spoke of. But for all the issues that remain intractable, we found signs of hope.
Check out the introduction to our series here.
The first story, titled What Republicans in Dallas can teach us about saving the planet, is here. You can watch a short documentary on an Alabama high school that "resegregated" after years of being a model of integration here. And you can follow all of our coverage from this series here.
In finance news:
GOLDMAN SACHS: Here's how to clean up in the market through the end of the year - For a stock market that's hovered near record highs for the better part of two months, there's a surprising lack of confidence that equities will finish the year on a tear.
DA COSTA: The Fed's rosy worldview rests on a misleading premise - The Federal Reserve's credibility is increasingly under scrutiny as it insists on raising interest rates despite signs of continued weakness in the labor market and, importantly, an inflation rate that refuses to climb to the central bank's official 2% target.
Young Wall Streeters were surveyed about their experiences in finance - and their responses were brutal - Wall Street has cause for concern.
BANK OF AMERICA: We may have just witnessed the "first step" toward the end of the bull market - You'd be hard-pressed to find an equity strategist at a major Wall Street firm who has called the end of the 8-year-old bull market. But they may have just done that as a collective, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
The body tasked with preventing the next financial crisis is turning its attention to fintech - The Financial Stability Board has set its sights on fintech as a potential source of future global financial instability and is monitoring the sector closely, its chairman Mark Carney told journalists on Monday.
Goldman Sachs is rethinking a business that has given it fits this year - Goldman Sachs is rethinking its strategy in commodities after traders took a beating the first half of the year, according to Bloomberg.